Intro: An Urban farm

This is my dad's garden.
Each year, for the past couple of years, we've planted vegetables and fruits, a few flowers, and used our chickens' "manure" for the fertilizer. And each year, the crop yields a few months of delicious, flavor-packed, fresh organic tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, arugula, mizuna, and/or mustard greens. Not to mention fresh eggs. All to add to my mom's delicious diverse cooking and my dad's killer smoked, grilled, or otherwise steak and BBQ.

I get a lot of amazed reactions from friends at school when I tell them we have chickens in our backyard and a mini-farm like this. It IS a highly urbanized area, in the middle of San Jose, CA. Around here it's pretty unusual to have a garden like we do, but at least we get to have a taste (pun intended) of what it's like to grow your own food in the countryside. And let me tell you, it's awesome, and everyone else is missing out.

Hopefully these photos will inspire someone else in the city to start growing their own food as well. It's fun, and it's a great family thing to look forward to planting new stuff every year around summertime. Go and use every bit of that backyard!

Here are a few pics of old and new things we have going this year.

EDIT: oops, I almost forgot... if you like my garden, pretty please cast a vote my way in the contest! Good luck to all entries out there!

More self suffiency people makes a more independant society from big powers.<br>Good work

Of course. The joys of raising your own garden are great as well. But for those who do not have the means, space, or time to raise their own garden (only speaking of the billions who live in crowded cities), I do respect big agricultural companies. I just wish they could all be organic. Unfortunately, the world's population and America's lifestyle of livin' large won't let that happen. Quality of store bought vegetables has to be subpar. Oh well.

Organic agriculture has been around and feeding the World's populations for thousands of years, the other sort, known as Agro Chemical has only been around since the Second World War. I'm afraid I don't respect big Ag at all it has precious little to do with farming or real food anymore and I certainly do not like the way animals are treated within it. Everyone who lives in a town or city should find out about social gardens, sharing gardens and community gardens. There are also many vertical set ups which allow people to grow food on balconies. There are some great ideas and more and more good people like yourselves out there growing their own food and the more you grow the more you will realise that organic for all is not only possible but it is just a return to the quality of food and life we used to have before big money got involved.